Not pretty, though. “I’m not insane,” he told a standing-room-only crowd of the Twin Cities’ geekiest geeks, who chuckled. They had packed the MinneBar tech fest on the fourth floor of the old brick Railroader Building in St. Paul’s Lowertown on Saturday to hear the 27-year-old celebrity programmer expound on his contribution to programming beautification, called Ruby on Rails.

Rails, as it is known for short, is a programming tool that has taken the world of Web development by storm since its introduction in 2004. It is a set of tools that took a once-obscure programming language called Ruby and made it several times faster, easier and cheaper to use to build the Web applications that are popping up like Internet daisies in the newest crop of dot-com mania, dubbed Web 2.0.

Creating Rails won Hansson the title of “best hacker of the year” two years ago from Google, the King Kong of Web 2.0, and O’Reilly Media, a well-known publisher of programming manuals. It also has turned Hansson into what MinneBar co-organizer Dan Grisby called a “nerd superhero.”

Now, Fortune 500 businesses are starting to pick up on Rails. The use of Rails could put a jet pack on Web development in large enterprises, and that could change how businesses work, with more applications moving off the desktop computers and onto company intranets or the Internet itself. That could loosen the hold traditional software makers have on their corporate customers, eroding a business model that has existed since the PC hit the office two decades ago.

Hansson himself doesn’t fit the stereotype of the tech nerd. His aesthetic sense doesn’t stop at the computer screen. He says on his blog, loudthinking.com, that he’s been stopped in the street by women who compliment him, saying, “Nice shoes!”

“I will comment that David has on really outstanding shoes today,” joked Jamie Thingelstad, chief technology officer at Dow Jones Online in Minneapolis, who interviewed Hansson talk-show style as they sat on the back of a couch so the crowd could see Hansson and his bright orange Pumas.

Hansson, a native of Denmark who now lives and works in Chicago for a tech development firm called 37 Signals, said he invented Rails while working on a Web project for his company.

Rails is a framework that helps programmers speed up the process of creating Web applications. “You don’t have to do the grunt work,” said Luke Francl, a developer with the Hopkins company SlantwiseDesign and co-organizer of MinneBar. Rails does it for you, he said.

A project that might usually take six months using more conventional programming could be whipped together in only a couple months using Rails, said Jon Dahl, the founder of SlantwiseDesign.

Hansson’s genius was putting all the programming tools for Web development using Ruby into one neat package – programmers call it “the full stack” – and stripping anything extraneous so it became a racecar to drive compared to dump-truck alternatives.

Hansson said the beauty of his code lies in its efficiency. “To me, it’s not about just getting things done. It’s about enjoying what I had done.”

Beautiful code inspires creation, he said. You’re happy when you use it. And happy programmers are more productive programmers.

He has no complaints about big businesses using Rails for their own projects. He said he talked to a techie from Minnetonka-based UnitedHealth Group who wanted tips on something his company was doing with Rails.

But he bristles at the idea of large software companies taking over Rails and loading it up with features. Rails is an open-source project, meaning anyone can use it at no charge and tweak it as they see fit.

“Usually, they say, ‘Great! This is simple and it just works and let’s make it more complex and screw it up!’ They don’t mean to screw it up, but that’s what they do,” he said.

Rails isn’t perfect. It runs applications slightly slower than more conventional programming, and while it may be the perfect tool for tiny startups, there are questions about whether it can handle large-scale operations, Dahl and Francl told attendees at a Rails workshop.

But in the open-source community, Rails has attained an almost cult-like following, and its popularity is spilling over into the business world.

“This is leading-edge stuff,” said Mark Kurtz, a marketing executive at IdeaPark, a Minneapolis marketing company. “It’s the simplicity. Anybody can do this.”

Leslie Brooks Suzukamo covers telecommunications, technology and energy issues. He can be reached at 651-228-5475 or lsuzukamo@pioneerpress.com.

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